Bay Area musician, composer and dharma student Ben Rivers speaks about what it’s like to live with severe disability from Parkinson's and Lyme diseases. He shares about his life as we explore seeing beyond appearances, relating to someone who seems different as not so different, with their own unique gifts and challenges.

We can actively engage in our healing & transformation by gathering skilful and wise intentions and consciously directing them. In this way we strengthen the creative potential of our mind. We can consciously direct our wise and skilful intentions in order to actively engage in our healing and transformation. In this way, we reinforce and strengthen the creative potential of our mind.

Our habit is to think we are on our way someplace else, and that our happiness is to be found outside ourselves. Yet realization becomes possible when we take the backward step into the formless dimension of our own being. This talk explores the two pathways that awaken us from our stories of self and reveal the love and awareness that is our true nature. (video available)

We continue to look at how mindfulness can be understood in the larger context of connection with ethics, wisdom, and the awakened heart. Here we explore how mindfulness and metta can be sometimes seen as separate, but how both practices point to a mature integration-loving awareness, mindful caring, the mindful and wise heart.

What is the self, how is it constructed - Who do you take yourself to be. This talk explains how to examine the nature of self - the attachment to self image/identity & how a mindful relationship to it can bring much clarity & peace.